You are so afraid of rogue elements within your own party that it will take you 2-3 election cycles to realise you have lost your discipline. In the past you said sit down and shut up to the various planks and they did. Now after two huge losses you are as disorganised as the Dems used to be.

When the lunatic fringe of any party (Christain Right or Lefty Anarchists) control the agenda in a centrist nation you lose. Time to retire Karl Rove and put him out to pasture and his tactics. Conservative and Liberal America rejected them and indeed made this a biog election about big things. The smears and sneers did not work and you did not have the sense to see it would not. That is how and why you lost.

Let McCain be McCain and you would have ost by a smaller margin. Choose Romney and you would have lost by even smaller one.

You are so afraid of rogue elements within your own party that it will take you 2-3 election cycles to realise you have lost your discipline. In the past you said sit down and shut up to the various planks and they did. Now after two huge losses you are as disorganised as the Dems used to be.

When the lunatic fringe of any party (Christain Right or Lefty Anarchists) control the agenda in a centrist nation you lose. Time to retire Karl Rove and put him out to pasture and his tactics. Conservative and Liberal America rejected them and indeed made this a biog election about big things. The smears and sneers did not work and you did not have the sense to see it would not. That is how and why you lost.

Let McCain be McCain and you would have ost by a smaller margin. Choose Romney and you would have lost by even smaller one.

I just had to laugh out loud when I got to the part about “the Democrats' ability to build their entire…machine from [sic] the Internet is the #1 existential challenge to (the Republican) party model.”

They seem genuinely oblivious to the existential dilemma written right into the masthead of their web site. “The Coalition” comprises about 45 members, of whom only 3 aren't males. And while you cannot judge by a name, I'd bet money that most, if not all, of the members are white.

I also love their take on how to build the best online presence: “by unleashing free market competition among trusted entrepreneurs and volunteers who want to help the party. The RNC should open its technology ecosystem so that trusted partners can develop on top of GOP.com and Voter Vault. We must build a corps of outside technology volunteers who compete to write applications that actually improve party operations — and invest in the best ones.”

I bet that's the first time these guys have used the word “ecosystem.”

Well, Republican “frugality” at its best–unleashing the free market…investing in overpriced proposals. Meanwhile, those “spend happy” Democrats like Al Gore build their sites on open source (= free) platforms like Drupal and Plone.

And tech volunteers to improve party operations? I bet ninety-five percent of the folks with the technical know-how are left-leaning, politically. Demographically, the folks who can do it are young and formally well-educated. The older folks who can do it are extremely well-educated (Ph.D.). These groups hands down are Democrats. The Republicans' use of internet seems limited to chain emails about Obama's imaginary Muslim identity. You really think that's the same “base” who can build you a new Republican web life? Oh, man, I just can't wait to see the glitter-graphics and dancing-GIF fund raising pages!

By the way, I am a product manager at a large social networking site. I'll give you some free consulting advice: The best of web sites never compensates for bad product.

1. it's your candidates, and your message that need to be improved, not simply your IT department. The politics of hate and fear won't translate so well into binary that you're sh**y message suddenly becomes transformative and popular. Lose the nutters and for christ's sake try to embrace tolerance, if only once in a while.
2. You might not do well to ' if we adopt a strongly anti-Washington message ' in 2012, or do a knee-jerk rip-off of Obama's 2008 campaign, as you seem to suggest. I think you'll find the 2012 election to be quite unlike the 2008 election: you will be facing an opponent that's a. Popular, and b. Incumbent. But, yeah – go ahead and take your play book from the strategies used against a wildly unpopular outgoing pres. See how that works for ya. You'll always be one step behind.

You guys might wanna concentrate on some policies and platforms that are a lot less factious and antiquated before you invest a whole lot of your $$ in servers and blog widgets. It's you the people don't like. It's the hate, and the intolerance they're sick of. Getting that message out farther and wider will only make more people hate it. You really need to drag yourselves into a more modernized and tolerant view of the world, something more…what's the word….progressive.

Or you could spend a bunch of money and spin up your “Guns, bibles, and no gays” virtual think tank website/blogoshphere/war room. I know what the world expects of you, maybe you can show some intelligence and surprise us.

Here are my reasons. 1. Nobody can rationally argue that the war in Iraq is winnable or affordable to the US treasury or the US military. 2. Nobody can rationally argue that the Republican tax plan (tax breaks to the rich, huge deficit spending, nothing for infrastructure, education or universal health care) can actually get the US out of our financial crisis. 3. Most Americans are not evangelical christians and most Americans would like to see a clear and strong separation of church and state. 4. Votes against gay marriage are not votes in support of the Republican party, even Obama expressed reservations about gay marriage. 5. The diviciveness and lack of diversity of the Republican party is truely frightning. Not since growing up in my all white suburban NY town in the 60s have I seen a group of such low diversity as what I saw at the Republican convention and Palin rallies.

I don't think many Americans want to go back to the 50s when non-whites had to fight for their rights, but the ideals that the Republican party has taken as it's own are rural American evangelical christian values, and this group is the least inclusive least diverse in America. When Obama said that they cling to God and guns he didn't mean it as an insult he meant it as an observation that anyone with their eyes open would recognize as the truth. Obama was trying to figure out if there was a way that their fears could be allayed so that they would not feel compelled to move away from the American government and towards the claws of unscupulous pastors and the securiy of weapons. This is not what America is supposed to be about. Americans huddling around Tammy Fey and then going home to reload some ammo so they can feel safe about the comming apacalypse.

The Republican party needs to cut religion loose and become the party of small government and business again.

Until the party is unified around some kind of core ideals that are compatible with the 21st century, web 2.0 will just give us conservatives new ways to argue with each other and disagree.